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John Chambers on Socializing Cisco... And Himself

Adam Bryant interviewed John Chambers recently, and the talk showed how important it is for leaders to adopt new tools if the company is going to move ahead:

Q. How has your leadership style evolved over time?

A. I’m a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that’s the style of the past. Today’s world requires a different leadership style — more collaboration and teamwork, including using Web 2.0 technologies. If you had told me I’d be video blogging and blogging, I would have said, no way. And yet our 20-somethings in the company really pushed me to use that more.

Q. Did you need to be pushed?

A. I thought I was very leading-edge in terms of how I communicated. My team just kept pushing, and I finally said, “Why do you want me to do this?” And they said: “John, if you don’t do it our company won’t learn how to do this. It won’t be built into our DNA for the way we interface with customers, our employees. The top has to walk the talk.” I was expecting text blogging and we did video blogging.

The first one was a little bit uncomfortable, because it’s very unprofessional. You just basically put a camera there, and you go. By the second one, I realized this was going to transform communications — not just for the C.E.O., but it would change how we do business.

[...]

Q. What’s changed in the last few years?

A. Big time, the importance of collaboration. Big time, people who have teamwork skills, and their use of technology. If they’re not collaborative, if they aren’t naturally inclined toward collaboration and teamwork, if they are uncomfortable with using technology to make that happen both within Cisco and in their own life, they’re probably not going to fit in here.

via www.nytimes.com

tags: #johnchambers, #socialbusiness

3 Reasons Why Social Media is Killing Search

Social Recommendations

When news breaks we are turning to search engines less and less. We are turning to each other and the real time results of social networks more and more. For breaking news I know that I’ll find a relevant link on Twitter and an outdated news story on Google. I only see one reason this trend will stop (which I’ll get to in my last point).

[...]

Lack of Search Innovation

This is the biggest problem and the thing that Google, Bing and every startup in search is trying to fix. The reason that Bing and Google are tripping over each other to integrate real time data is they are trying to get us all to come to them first when we here of breaking news. And I think that over time it will pay off. With all the noise and rising levels of spam in social media search has an advantage. If they can bring you immediate, real time results, they have a chance since they already have a pretty good handle on filtering spam.

Of course they’ll also get there by making some key acquisitions this year. Who are your bets on the first real time search starups to be acquired?

via www.newcommbiz.com

Metacuration? Controlled Serendipity? Active Reading?

- Nick Bilton, ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web

Another purveyor of fine content is Maria Popova, who calls this curating “controlled serendipity,” explaining that she filters interesting links to thousands of strangers out of her thirst for curiosity.

Mrs. Popova uses a meticulously curated feed of Web sites and Twitter followers to find each day’s pot of gold. She said, “I scour it all, hence the serendipity. It’s essentially ‘metacuration’ — curating the backbone, but letting its tentacles move freely. That’s the best formula for content discovery, I find.”

Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.

Surfing the Web has become even more of a challenge as more content appears online. We are asked to navigate any number of new obstacles when finding new content: which site should I click through to read the latest earthquake news? How many blogs should I check on a daily basis? What if I miss something? Do I read the comments everywhere, too? Which social network should I update in the morning, noon or night? The list goes on.

But we are solving the problem, through our aggregation. We’ve reduced the fear of missing something important because we share “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. And without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis.

I just call it ‘active reading’.

tags: #metacuration

Geononymity, Geoprivacy, and Geopublicy

Andrew Hyde is the newest (but not the only, or last) to drop out of the social geolocation wave:

Yesterday I checked in for my last time.  I’m done.  No more BrightKite, FourSquare or Gowalla.  I was an early user on all three of the services, and am quitting cold turkey.

But why? (and why would anyone care…)

Well, why anyone would care can only be pointed to me just being a point of data as a heavy user leaving the services. I was a poweruser.  878 posts on Brightkite, 703 checkins on Foursquare, 54 stamps with Gowalla, and I had enabled geotagging on my twitter account and posted over 2000 messages.

Simply: too much work and risk, too little reward.

All I got were quite a few stalker like experiences grouped with a shift of my thinking about location based services from expression of physical identity to needless ego boost.

via andrewhy.de

Andrew has snapped from being very geopublic to a new state of 'geononymous', as my friend Ed Simnett styles it. Basically, Andrew had someone (or someones?) stalk him based on his geoclues. And now, like someone who's house was burgled after posting their travel plans on Facebook, he's done.

I am fairly public about my comings and goings, but even I don't push every movement. I have set Google Latitude to publish on the city level, but nothing of finer grain. I personally might post that I have 'just landed in /NYC' or that I am chilling in my office, or the hotel I have checked into. But I am sporadic, at best.

And I certainly haven't succumbed to the charmless inducements of Foursquare and Gowalla, who seem to be based on some gaming DNA I just don't have.

But I think that Andrew needs finer grained controls of his geoclues, not no clues at all. I know that some people will opt for full-on geopublicy -- where basically every time they cross a threshold the world will hear of it -- but most others would like a more private model -- geoprivacy -- where only those that are trusted by one can find out where you are.

I am surprised that Andrew's turned from Brightkite, since that level of control is something they shine at: they provided a private toggle, where only those that you have chosen to know your every move will see where you are once it is flipped. He could simply flip the switch forever.

But opting out altogether is the surest way to reach geononymity, and that seems to be what Andrew wants. At least for now.

tags: #geononymity, #geononymous, #publicy, #geopublicy, #geoprivacy, #andrewhyde, #edsimnett

How News Happens: A Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City

Tremendously fascinating study by the Pew Project For Excellence In Journalism, details the news reporting in Baltimore during a certain week. Aside from looking at the distribution and number of the news stories created and how they were circulated online, the study reveals that different media pint different worlds:

Yet the quantity of stories produced does not tell everything about their nature.

Some media were more locally focused than others. The media sector that devoted the greatest level of its coverage to local events was TV news. Fully 64% of the stories on the local 6 p.m. TV newscasts were about local matters.[5] By comparison, 53% of stories studied in Baltimore area newspapers were local. In talk radio, the majority of the segments were about national or non-local events (52%).

The new media content in new media, on the other hand, was highly local and mostly locally produced, though, as we will see, it was often brief and derivative of other news accounts. More than eight out of ten of the postings or stories (85%) were locally focused.

The level of original work also varied. Eight out of ten newspaper stories (80%) were straight news accounts written by local staffers.

In television, there was also less original content from staff reporters. Roughly a third the stories, 34%, were edited packages featuring correspondents doing the reporting (the TV equivalent of an original staff written story), and another 13% were anchors narrating a taped package that did not feature a correspondent from the field. But more than a third 36% were “anchor reads” and “tell stories,” often material from wire services.

In radio there was little of what would be considered reporting. Roughly half the segments were anchors doing monologues, and 38% of the segments involved the host interviewing a guest or a caller. There was no original reporting found, either in talk radio or in the news inserts and radio headlines that were produced during the periods studied (during the 7 a.m. drive time hour).

Looking at the topics covered, too, the news agendas of these outlets were strikingly different. The world one encounters differs dramatically depending on where one seeks his or her information.

On local television, for instance, fully 23% of stories studied were about crime, twice as many as other subject.[6] In newspapers (online and print) coverage of crime was almost matched by that of government and closely followed by business and education. On radio in Baltimore, by contrast, government was the No. 1 topic. New media was most often focused on government. 

via www.journalism.org

McLuhan was obviously right when he said "the medium is the message." When you view the world through the lens of a medium -- let's say TV -- your perception of what is going on -- the amount of crime, in this case -- is shaped by the way the newshole is filled.

I am sure that the same is true in social news: the people that I follow choose what sort of snippets to quote or link to. My worldview is shaped by the thousands of independent choices made by a swarm of edglings, and then I chose which to click on, read, blog, or retweet. And the thousands downstream of me are influenced by my acts, as one of the many minds they are following.

This is the future of news: we, the edglings, passing bits of news around as social objects, and growing the strength of our connections as an direct consequence.

I think this is socially transformative, and ultimately a richer way to live and contribute to the social polity than being a passive member of an 'audience' for radio jokesters or TV talking heads.

tags: #socialnews, #projecttforexcellenceinjournalism, #pew

NYTimes Goes Freemium

The New York Times has confirmed that it will be moving to a fee-based, 'metered' model on its website in 2011. For those of us in the tech industry, we will immediately recognize this as the 'freemium' business model, which is used by many web service businesses, like Flickr and Basecamp. People get a basic account for free, but have to move up to premium, fee-supported services when they want to surpass some limits, like number of projects or how many photos you can view.

Personally, I think they have taken the wrong path: they should be charging for social news, not more news.

Social news lines up with the social revolution directly. Instead of charging for the 20th article, the NYTimes.com could be charging me to manage a network of followers and followings. I would honestly be more interested in what Bill Keller and Tim O'Reilly are reading this morning and what they think of it, than all the obits and sports news in the world.

The New York Times is one of the more experimental newspaper companies out there. TimesPeople, Skimmer, and the NYTimes Reader demonstrate that they can sling code just like software companies do. But instead of thinking about it as a web service with customers like me who want more features they are stuck thinking about it as a newspaper where people want more articles. Which we don't.

I want to know what people care about, and the news is a means to that end. What I need is an online system to help me make sense of the news, and the only hope for that is a social context through which news flows.

Several of the obvious barriers to the New Yorks Times doing this are conceptual. Since they see themselves as the source of sense making -- what the editorial page is supposed to do -- they are reluctant to let mere readerlings opine in a major way on their service. And they are also the authors of their own journalism, so they wouldn't want us to stream other news sources through their back yard.

It's all so parochial that it's hard not to laugh.

But I am not opposed to paying for service: I pay hundreds every year for a hosted blog on Typepad, for example. But why doesn't the New York Times offer me a hosted blog service with modules based on how the NYTimes.com site works? As just one example, I would love to have an integrated database where I could create entries about companies, individuals, issues, and topics, with automatic backlinks to stories I have posted, touching on them.

At any rate, that may seem awfully mercantile to them. But I read somewhere that the Guardian is making 30% of its revenue selling things to readers. And the Times is always trying to sell me photos from the past, or wine. Why not become a software company? All the successful media companies of the future will look like software companies, constantly upgrading their technology base. It is *the* source of all competitive advantage as the world goes digital.

And if they don't, I wonder if this will still be true in five years?

NYTimes.com is the No. 1 newspaper-owned Web site and a top five current events and global news site according to Nielsen Online.

via www.businesswire.com

(See Tearing Up The Tabloid: What A Hyperactive NY Times Reader Might Want, for some more of my thinking on this.)

Thomas Friedman on John Hagel's Knowledge Flows

John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released “Shift Index” that we’re in the midst of “The Big Shift.” We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.

“Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.

via www.nytimes.com

One of the major drivers for social business is aggressively forging new relationships between people within the business and highly knowledgeable people outside the business. This increases the ability of the business to work and take effective action because these relationships extend the intelligence and thinking of the company.

It's not that the people within the business are consuming information outsiders produce. That social media-oriented, information-based viewpoint misses the point by looking at the situation too simplistically.

By creating more relationships -- even those based on weak ties -- the social business increases its IQ.

The people you are connected to help you by thinking about your problems, responding with advice and other connections, and amplifying what you do or think. And you are doing the same for them.

This is what I mean when I say 'I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.'

Fred Wilson on New York Is For Startups

Why is New York City a good place for startups?

I think New York is a very entrepreneurial city first and foremost and I think it always has been--going back to when it was originally settled. There's always been a trading mentality in this town, a merchant mentality in this town and it's always been ethnically diverse. People from all over the world have settled here.

Are there particular types of startups that do better in New York than others?

Anything that touches Wall Street or Madison Avenue or the entertainment and media business, I think arguably is better centered here in New York than anywhere else in the world and that's the kind of thing that is the historical legacy of New York. You get a lot of advertising-oriented businesses like Double Click, a lot of Wall Street-oriented businesses like Bloomberg. Everybody talks about Google and Microsoft and Cisco and companies like that, but probably one of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the past quarter century is Bloomberg, you know, which was built as a New York-centered company and Mike Bloomberg owns almost all of it. They didn't use venture capital--so talk about entrepreneurial success.

We're [also] seeing a lot of other things. There's a lot of social media in New York, there's a lot of location-based, a bit of urban-lifestyle-based services that are coming out of New York and so, a lot of companies that are servicing the media industry and the entertainment industry are centered here in New York. There are a lot of different categories now that have some real size.

via Laura Rich, www.fastcompany.com

This interview in Fast Company makes good reading, and underlines why I am going to do a series on New York's tech scene.

tags: #newyork, #fredwilson

Completely Connected

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.

via www.nytimes.com

The 100% connected generation is here. Every waking minute they are online.

This is a great cause for the Sunday supplement writers. "They'll go blind! What about calm and reflection? They are losing the ability to [fill in the blank: relate to people, read the newspaper, think critically, exercise, spend time alone]."

We'll hear it all.

This is interesting, though:

Youths now spend more time listening to or watching media on their cellphones, or playing games, than talking on them.

A cell phones is no longer a phone + other capabilities. It's now a mobile internet-enabled device that also works as a phone.

tags: #youth, #media, #mobile, #alwayson

Joining 90:10

I am happy to announce that I will be working with 90:10, a confederation of brilliant advisors and consultants, led by my old friend David Cushman

Stowe Boyd joins 90:10

The 90:10 Group is delighted to announce global social tools authority Stowe Boyd as the latest addition to its consulting network: a constellation of stars with unparalleled knowledge and expertise.

via ninety10group.com

Please visit the site and take a look at the great bunch of folks, including my pal, Euan Semple, Chris Torpe, Gerd Leonhard, and Lidia Miras Martinez.

Facebook Wants To Be Twitter, Part II

This evening Facebook began testing what appears to be their version of Twitter’s retweet feature: “via”. On any article shared by your friend, you can click on “Share” and when you post the article to your profile, Facebook will now automatically say who the article came from. While the “via” content only currently works on shared articles, I’d assume that this feature would be extended to other stream stories if initial user testing proves successful. We’ve written extensively about the Twitterfication of Facebook, and this appears to be one more step in that process.

via www.allfacebook.com

I haven't had a chance to look at this closely, but it lines up with what I wrote a few months back (see Facebook Wants To Be Twitter):

Remember that Zuckerberg didn't dream up the design of the original Facebook: he stole the whole thing while working with the Brothers Winklevoss and others on ConnectU (and settled for $65M). His scheme with Twitter was to buy what he sees as the superior model to Facebook Classic. That acquisition failed, so he has acquired Friendfeed's brain trust, and they are busy rewiring the DNA of the platform.

Don't get me wrong: he may become a very serious challenge to Twitter. He has serious bank. I think the Twitter guys should do that IPO and hire an additional 100 people to keep innovating faster than he can keep up. And not by rejiggering things like retweet -- we need some more groundbreaking advances.

Notice that this was an implementation of Retweet. Looks he knocked off the New RT, not Classic.

tags: #facebook, #twitter, #zuckerberg, #retweet

Disaster Microsyntax: Project EPIC, Tweak The Tweet, And Emergency Codes

A number of folks working with Project Epic are scrambling to devise a workable microsyntax to help with disaster relief in Haiti.

Project EPIC has a larger charter, but this Haitian response is directly in its area of focus, for sure:

Project EPIC, which launched in September 2009, is supported by a $2.8M grant from the US National Science Foundation.  It is multi-disciplinary, multi-university, multi-lingual research effort to support the information needs by members of the public during times of mass emergency. In this age of social media, we bring our behavioral and technical knowledge of "computer mediated communication" to the world of crisis studies and emergency response. As researchers, we are committed to careful study of socio-technical transformation and building human-centered computation. In addition to empirical observational study that requires new ways of studying massive "widescale" coordination across the internet, we conduct "action research" and employ "participatory design" oriented approaches. We aim to look beyond today's state of the art and anticipate future socio-technical change.

via epic.cs.colorado.edu

The Haitian earthquake has led to the spontaneous use of Twitter to communicate about missing people, request help of various kinds, and other disaster-related needs. The group is promoting 'Tweek The Tweet', a collection of defined hashtags ('beacons') and related microsyntax. One of the drivers for this is the desire to use existing twitter applications and search tools, which prohibited the development of anything radically different, a topic I will return to.

Here's what is proposed:

Real Tweet Examples for Haiti

On 2010-01-16 06:15:45 RIElliott said:
#Haiti #Need Dr treating survivors need people & supplies #Contact Dr Denis Cyrille Rue Monseigneur Guilloux #556 Cell# 3555-1406 via@MejidX
 
On 2010-01-16 06:09:46 RIElliott said:
#Haiti #Need generator & water pump repair, tents #Location Leogane, Haiti Nursing School #Contact @nursetim www.haitinursing.org
 
On 2010-01-16 05:56:28 407underground said:
#Haiti #need #rescue #name American & UF Alumni Lee Strickland is stuck there alive #location Hotel Montana.
Please RT send help now!
 
On 2010-01-16 05:56:28 407Rob said:
#Haiti #need #rescue #name American & UF Alumni Lee Strickland is stuck there alive #location Hotel Montana. Please RT send help now!
 
On 2010-01-16 05:33:19 RIElliott said:
#Haiti #need #rescue #name American Christine Legagneur is stuck there alive #location UNIBANK Bourdon (via @carodefay)

Our team and collaborators are proposing a Tweet-friendly hashtag-based syntax to help direct Twitter communications for more efficient data extraction for those communicating about the Haiti earthquake disaster. Use only requires modifications of Tweet messages to make information pieces that refer to #location, #status, #needs, #damage and several other elements of emergency communications more machine readable. This allows for easier automated collation by any number of groups and good samaritans from any number of sources. HELP US SPREAD THE WORD!!!
Read on for immediate simulated life examples, instructions for deployment, and the initial tag folksonomy for the Haiti disaster. Tags in French are now also available. We welcome ongoing assistance in language translation for on-the-ground use when that becomes possible, and international deployment.

Tweet Examples In Use (See New Real Tweets to Right):

EXAMPLE1: #haiti #imok #name John Doe #loc Mirebalais Shelter #status minor injuries
EXAMPLE2: #haiti #need #transport #loc Jacmel #num 10 #info medical volunteers looking for big boat to transport to PAP
EXAMPLE3: #haiti #need #translator #contact @pierrecote
EXAMPLE5: #haiti #ruok #name Raymonde Lafrotune #loc Delmas 3, Rue Menelas #1
EXAMPLE4: #haiti #ruok #name Camelia Siquineau #loc Hotel Montana
EXAMPLE6: #haiti #offering #volunteers #translators #loc Florida #contact @FranceGlobal

Mission/Instructions for a Two-Pronged Deployment:
1) Promote grammar through available digital communication channels to get immediate pick-up by people, including those who are affected, emergency personnel, and—perhaps most usefully for immediate use—volunteers
To this end, please send out prescriptive examples, such as these:

#haiti pls tweet in the format: #haiti #ruok #name [first last] #loc [location] #contact [@ or #]

#haiti pls tweet in the format: #haiti #imok #name [first last] #loc [location] #status [status] #contact [@ or #]

#haiti pls tweet in the format: #haiti #need #medical #loc [location] #num

#haiti pls tweet in the format: #haiti #offering #shelter #loc [address] #num [amount] #contact [@ or #]

#haiti pls use these 1st hashtags: #imok, #ruok, #offering, #need, #damage, #status

#haiti pls use these 2nd hashtags: #food #water #shelter #transport #volunteers #translators #fuel #information

#haiti pls use these data hashtags: #name [first last] #loc [address, intersection] #num [amount] #contact [@ or #]

#haiti pls use these end hashtags: #status [status info] #info [more information, comment]

And here's some real examples:

Real Tweet Examples for Haiti

On 2010-01-16 06:15:45 RIElliott said:

#Haiti #Need Dr treating survivors need people & supplies #Contact Dr Denis Cyrille Rue Monseigneur Guilloux #556 Cell# 3555-1406 via@MejidX

On 2010-01-16 06:09:46 RIElliott said:

#Haiti #Need generator & water pump repair, tents #Location Leogane, Haiti Nursing School #Contact @nursetim www.haitinursing.org

On 2010-01-16 05:56:28 407underground said:

#Haiti #need #rescue #name American & UF Alumni Lee Strickland is stuck there alive #location Hotel Montana. Please RT send help now!

On 2010-01-16 05:56:28 407Rob said:

#Haiti #need #rescue #name American & UF Alumni Lee Strickland is stuck there alive #location Hotel Montana. Please RT send help now!

On 2010-01-16 05:33:19 RIElliott said:

#Haiti #need #rescue #name American Christine Legagneur is stuck there alive #location UNIBANK Bourdon (via @carodefay) 

A Few Observations, To Be Considered After The Disaster Is Over

One of the problems with microsyntax based on hashtags is that hashtags are words in specific languages, so there is an immediate divergence in this case with English and French, and perhaps Creole, as well?

This is countered by the creation of a second gloassary of hashtags in French, but the equivalence is not immediately obvious.

The second problem is that people aren't using the templates as defined. For example, "#name American & UF Alumni Lee Strickland is stuck there alive' does have a name in it, but it's buried. To use a simple metric, a stupid program wouldn't be able to extract 'Lee Strickland' from that.

I think that a few other approaches could work better even given the requirements that a disaster imposes:

• People will have only the most primitive communication capabilities, like cell phones, or public computers. (We have to imagine these at least, or Twitter and microsyntax can't play a role at all.)
• We have to rely on Twitter as the basic platform, although it is possible to imagine external applications that are designed to work with Twitter, so long as they don't require specialized software or hardware on the communication device. This means that specialized applications can be developed that interoperate with Twitter. As just one example, geolocational elements could be used to display messages relative to locations in a stricken area, like Haiti in this case.
• Hashtags are a general purpose tool, like a hammer, but even the best hammer can't be used for all purposes. A hammer is a bad wrench, for example. In general, hashtags are intended to represent themes or topics that a post is about. Extending them to act as keywords is attractive at the moment, because various search tools currently identify the '#abc' structure. But using hashtags consumes too many characters unnecessarily in a 104 character contex.

Other microsyntax has emerged, like @user and RT, that have become implemented directly in Twitter, and a wide variety of other microsyntax is in use, informally. I have even set up a non-profit organization, Microsyntax.org, to research and advocate microsyntactic conventions. (In a supreme proof of the bad timing inherent in the universe, I am currently involved in rebuilding the Microsyntax.org website, so it is in disarray. I hope to have it reworked in the next few days, however.)

My recommendations at this point for Disaster microsyntax are these:

1. We should dedicate '!' to indicate that a message is associated with a specific named disaster or emergency. This use of 'bang' or 'exclamation mark' should take precedence over other possible uses of the character. I propose we call these 'Emergency Codes'. Some international organization -- perhaps the UN? Red Cross? -- should be responsible for the naming of the disaster. This should be the first element of the post. For example, '!Katrina' would have appeared at the head of all emergency tweets related to Katrina. Note that this is in distinction to the use of #katrina in a post, which does not indicate that it is an emergency post, just someone commenting on Katrina, for example in regard to local Lousiana politics.
2. Twitter and related applications, like Twitter cllients, should be extended to support the use of bang in obvious ways. Note that this possibly means that Twitter could give preference to the passing of emergency messages, if necessary.
3. Geolocation is more general than emergency, and some general convention should be used for that. I have advocated the so-called 'geoslash' notation, but this is a critical part of the whole picture.
4. The syntax of emergency messages should be structured enough so that all parts of the message are defined elements, but loose enough that order of the various elements is arbitrary.
5. A collection of two and three character codes based on bang should be developed to indicate various sorts of information useful in emergencies. For example, '!@' could stand for the name of a person, based on the use of '@' in Twitter and other applications. '!@@' could be used for organizations, businesses, and so on. '!?' could represent a question being asked, and '!!' could be used for things desired, needed or the like.
6. A general model for adding a note or status to any defined element could rely on ':'. For example, '!@john jones: alive' would indicate that John Jones is alive (in English).

Here's an example, for a hypothetical disaster, a hurricane called 'Bette' that has hit the eastern seaboard of the US:

!bette !@john jones: alive /wellfleet hospital/

This is an emergency message stating that John Jones is alive and is located at Wellfleet Hospital. Alternatively, the hospital could have been identified as an emergency-related organization or business, with '!@@wellfleet hospital' instead of being treated as a location.

!bette @carlabreck !?@sam ying: with you? 

This is directed to @carlabreck using her twitter ID, asking the status of Sam Ying, specifically whether he is with her.

!bette /usps, provincetown MA/ !!food blankets: 20 people stranded here !!medevac: 1 compound fracture

This indicates a request '!!' for food and blankets for 20 people stranded at the post office in Provincetown, and a request for a medevac for someone with a compound fracture.

Note that this message could be jumbled in different ways -- !bette !!medevac: 1 compound fracture /usps, provincetown MA/ !!food blankets: 20 people stranded here -- and it would still have the same meaning.

!bette /usps, provincetown MA/ !@hassan haque: compound fracture of the lower right leg

This is an accompanying message to the previous, indicating the name of the person with the compound fracture.

!bette /home depot, hyannisport/: roof has blown off the main building and is blocking Main Street www.sto.ly/8797gd

This is an informational post, identifying a hazard so that authorities monitoring might do something.

Note that these could be translated into other languages, and all the microsyntax would be the same: an international code for emergency messages.

Lastly, specialized applications could be developed to capture the emergency messages and track them in various ways: collating all the requests for medevac, for example, so that helicopters could be scheduled more efficiently, or collating all the request for blankets and food.

I plan to contact the folks at EPIC and volunteer to work with them on these and related ideas, as soon as possible, as well as kicking off a new project at Microsyntax.org, developing these ideas more completely. I also invte others to get involved, and in particular, I would welcome developer support in building an open source example web application that would parse Emergency Codes and aggregate the information in useful ways. Others could take that code and create other more specialized applications for various purposes.

I hope that EPIC, Microsyntax.org, and others can harness the attention caused by the tragic event in Haiti to come up with something to help the next time.

Social Business Innovation Awards

My friend David Cushman has announced a series of Social Business Awards, to recognize the best and most innovative social tools and their application:

Social business innovation: Efficiency and tranformation through the use of social tools.

We have the best set of tools in history for people to find each other and act together to create and improve on the things that matter to them.

[...]

I hope you will join with me to celebrate the best of them - and through this find a path to the communities-of-purpose-driven future of the organisation.

So each month this blog will host a Social Business Innovation of The Month award, nominated by you and voted on by you. The format is very much inspired by Neil Perkin's ThinkTank.

The awards are to recognise great work in open/social business/organisational design/innovation/tranformation/efficiency using social technologies.

The winners will enter a case-study Hall of Fame to be shared with all - and in which the winners can revel in the glory of their peers' admiration ;-). More importantly, we can all get inspiration and guidance.

via fasterfuture.blogspot.com

I will be posting recipients and other announcements.

tags: #socialbusiness, #socialbusinessawards, #davidcushman

Muhammad Yunus and 'Social Business'

The term 'social business' has several meanings. Nobel laureate Mohammed Yunus and others within the non-profit and charitable sector use it in this sense:

A social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective. The profits are used to expand the company’s reach and improve the product/service.

via Wikipedia

It seems that this term is more widely used internationally than in the US, where it appears less frequently. In the US this expression is less familiar, I think.

Meanwhile, 'social business' has come to mean something else altogether in the web community. It has been derived by analogy with terms like social tools, social media, social networks, and so on. These form a network of related terms in which 'social business' is a natural and obvious extension, that I define in this way:

An organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web.

I guess we are destined for convergence in these terms. And someone has to go edit the Wikipedia page, too.

[thanks to Thomas A for reminding me to clarify this.]

tags: #yunus, #social business

Why? (The King Of Love) Is Dead - Nina Simone

Once upon this planet Earth,
Lived a man of humble birth,
Preaching love and freedom
For his fellow man.

He was dreaming of the day
Peace would come to Earth to stay,
And he spread this message
All across the land.

“Turn the other cheek,” he’d plead.
“Love thy neighbor,” was his creed.
Pain, humiliation, death he did not dread.
With his bible at his side,
From his foes he did not hide.
It’s hard to think that this great man is dead.

Will the murders never cease?
Are they men or are they beasts?
What do they ever hope to gain?
Will my country stand or fall?
Is it too late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?

But he had seen the mountaintop,
And he knew he could not stop,
Always living with the threat of death ahead.
Folks you’d better stop and think,
Everybody knows we’re on the brink.
What will happen, now that he is dead?

He was for equality,
For all people, you and me,
Full of love and goodwill,
Hate was not his way.

He was not a violent man,
Tell me folks if you can?
Just why, why was he shot down the other day?

But he had seen the mountaintop,
And he knew he could not stop.
Always living with the threat of death ahead.

Folks you’d better stop and think,
Cause we headed for the brink,
What will happen, now that the King of love is dead?

Highest Recent Postranked Posts

I have been fooling with Postrank, and finding it a very useful way to gauge the impact that my /Message posts are having. I wish the follwong table was the result of javascript, but I manually pulled posts ranked 7.0 or higher from 17 August 2009.

Social Does Not Mean Gregarious / January 15, 2010 @ 11:09AM
Defining Social Business / January 14, 2010 @ 12:34PM
The False Question Of Attention Economics / January 9, 2010 @ 3:06PM
To Get Organized, Get Unorganized / January 7, 2010 @ 12:18PM
Your Next Computer: Your Car / January 7, 2010 @ 7:31AM
Skype From Your Living Room / January 6, 2010 @ 1:09PM
Secrecy, Privacy, Publicy / December 30, 2009 @ 12:32PM
Texting Isn't The Distraction, Driving Is: A Parable For Social Business / December 28, 2009 @ 11:14AM
Twitter API and Microblogging: What About Tumblebacks? / December 18, 2009 @ 10:55AM
Facebook Wants To Be Twitter / December 10, 2009 @ 6:34AM<
Yahoo And Facebook, Sitting In A Tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G / December 3, 2009 @ 9:39AM
i = Future Of Newspapers = Think, Know, Understand, and Feel / November 23, 2009 @ 10:03AM
The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process / November 17, 2009 @ 9:03AM
Twitter's New Retweet / November 9, 2009 @ 7:12AM
Twitter Filters and Fonters: Static Lists and Dynamic Agents / November 6, 2009 @ 5:20PM
The Sum Of All Fears: The Social Business Naysayers / November 6, 2009 @ 2:37PM
Seth Godin Misunderstands Dunbar's Number, And Stubs His Toe / October 31, 2009 @ 10:32PM
10 Minute Sprint from 140 Characters Conference: Social Business / October 27, 2009 @ 7:23PM
Fair To Everyone / October 18, 2009 @ 2:58AM
The New Technorati: Real-Time Influence / October 14, 2009 @ 8:22PM
Different Kinds Of Twitterers: What's The Right Balance For Business? / October 3, 2009 @ 6:27PM
Orwellian Nonsense At The Washington Post: Reporters, Shut Up! / September 28, 2009 @ 9:01AM
Tyler Brûlé Bristles At Twitter / September 26, 2009 @ 7:16AM
A Good Email Pitch / September 11, 2009 @ 8:52AM
Self Regulation In Internet Advertising? Don't Make Me Laugh. / September 8, 2009 @ 4:00PM
The War On Flow, 2009: Why Studies About Multitasking Are Missing The Point / August 30, 2009 @ 8:33AM
My Name Is Stowe, And I Am An Onfovore / August 22, 2009
Corporations Want To Own Our Experiences And Our Culture / August 17 2009

There's a book in there somewhere.

Cristóbal Conde on The Social Business

Although he never uses the term, Cristobal Conde really understands the nature of the social business, starting with the individual, the use of social tools, and the new role of management:

This interview with Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Dan Neville/The New York Times

Q. What are your thoughts on collaborative versus top-down management?

A. Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.

Q. Why did that shift occur?

A. I would say two things. One is just the massive information revolution. But equally important is the fact that before, while there were global companies, they were really just a collection of very local businesses operating independently from each other. Now a global company means a company composed of teams that are themselves dispersed. So every team can be global in many senses, not just the company.

But with the explosion of information, and flattening technologies starting with e-mail, I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything.

You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.

Q. How do you create that culture?

A. One thing we use is a Twitter-like system on our intranet called Yammer.

Q. How long have you used it?

A. About seven months. By having technologies that allow people to see what others are doing, share information, collaborate, brag about their successes — that is what flattens the organization. I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.

I think too many bosses think that their job is to be the lead, and I don’t. By creating an atmosphere of collaboration, the people who are consistently right get a huge following, and their work product is talked about by people they’ve never met. It’s fascinating.

Q. What kind of things do you write on Yammer?

A. I try to see a client every day, and because of my title I get to see more senior people. And so then they’ll tell me things — you know, what are their biggest problems, what are their biggest issues, what are their biggest bets. All this information is incredibly valuable. Now, what could I do with that? I’m not going to send that out in a broadcast voice mail to every employee. I’m not even going to write a long e-mail about it to every employee, because even that is almost too formal. But I can write five lines on Yammer, which is about all it takes.

A free flow of information is an incredible tool because I can tell people, “Look, this is one of our largest clients, and the C.E.O. just told me his top three priorities are X, Y and Z. Think about them.”

via www.nytimes.com

This is a must read piece for anyone wondering about the benefits of social tools, and the impact that a tuned-in senior executive can have on a organization.

Conde paints an unflattering portrait of himself as having been an autocratic workaholic, but he realized that no matter how smart he was he couldn't make every decision in a business with more than a few hundred employees. It wouldn't scale. But he thought it through and moved to a much more decentralized organization with very high levels of autonomy, which I feel is one of the defining characteristics of a social business (see Defining Social Business).

tags: cristobal conde, social business, sungard, adam bryant, yammer

The Reviewing Stand

Snarky piece about people writing reviews online

Seeing The World Through Risk-Colored Glasses

The proliferation of consumer-based social networking throughout enterprise organizations is creating a significant amount of security risk that needs to be better understood and carefully managed before it’s too late, according to the results of a global study commissined by Cisco, which revealed a widespread and growing need for more policies, processes and IT architecture.

The study, which was designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally and how such use is governed, found that the use of consumer-based social networking tools - such as Facebook and Twitter - as collaboration platforms is connecting organizations with the external world unprecedented ways.

But while these tools have the promise to better marry technology and business, link people and information, establish potential new routes to market, and enhance customer intimacy and brand awareness, the business world is still only in the early stages of identifying key challenges, such as the need for increased governance and IT involvement.

via www.marketingcharts.com

In principle, I have no problem discussing the risks in companies adopting social technologies.

However, when some groups or individuals start out with an agenda the fear and aversion factor may be dialed way up -- in this case the studies involved were commissioned by Cisco. Cisco has -- no surprise -- a sizable security business, and is moving into the business of telling others how to secure their social technologies and practices.

The Future of Social Networking and Collaboration Tools in the Enterprise

• Across the board, respondents recognized that consumer-based social networking and collaboration tools will continue to evolve, as will their complexity, and that these tools will continue to influence the way business is conducted. The key for organizations will be the way they adopt and integrate these tools into the enterprise IT environment.
• The following issues need to be addressed regarding the adoption, deployment and governance of social networking in the enterprise: when, how and what initiatives are to be launched (and not launched); how the enabling technologies should be managed; and how employee use of these technologies should be managed.

I will leave aside the question of 'managing' employee use of social networking for another time, perhaps if and when I get a chance to talk to people at Cisco.

I think companies starting on a path toward exploiting social networks for the business should be 90% offense and 10% defense. Cisco may be trying to reverse the ratios.

tags: #cisco, #risk, #socialnetworks

Tumblr Has A New Dashboard

After several weeks of parsing through your feedback and making adjustments, the new Dashboard nav is up!

Just two things to note:

• To fix the issue with unnecessary unread counts on blogs you’re already following, we now only show unread counts for private blogs.
• We’re about to totally overhaul the Directory, along with the Activity page and Tumblarity which power it. In preparation, we’ve taken both of these pages offline while we make changes. More soon!

via Tumblr Staff Blog

I thought Tumblarity might have been dropped, but it looks like they are only redoing.

Hmmm. It certainly need to be reconsidered. Wasn't very social. I would be more interested in local measures of relevance, like who do I personally retweet the most and so on. Those global lists aren't very interesting.

Google Calendar Widget: A Small Touch

 

I had never noticed this before, so I am assuming it is the outcome of my enabling the Google Calendar widget inside of Gmail. I was looking at an email from someone, and the widget (I believe) displayed an upcoming appointment with that same person. Very helpful.

Strange that the reverse isn't the case: When looking at a Google calendar entry, it would be equally helpful to see a list of recent emails from the person you are going to meet. That isn't implemented, alas.

tags: #gmail, #gcal

Social Does Not Mean Gregarious

There’s an old-saying among marketers: “Good marketing won’t save a bad business.” Entrepreneurs and small business owners are starting to realize that the same is true for the tools and tactics of social media: Social media will not make you a social business.

So marketers are starting to adjust. They have decided to first teach you how to be a social business. Companies have been formed to teach you how to be a social business. Great thought has been put into a roadmap to becoming a social business. This is all fine and good for businesses that are truly social. But what if that's not your natural inclination? If you're not ordinarily gregarious, should you spend time trying to teach yourself to be social?

via www.themarketingspotblog.com

I like the message, right up to 'If you're not ordinarily gregarious, should you spend time trying to teach yourself to be social?'

Here we see the common confusion about what we mean when we talk about the social web of social business. But this is a wider confusion that just in this context, as shown by the Wikipedia entry

The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term "social" is used in many different senses and regarded as a fuzzy concept, referring among other things to:

• Attitudes, orientations, or behaviours which take the interests, intentions, or needs of other people into account (in contrast to anti-social behaviour);has played some role in defining the idea or the principle. For instance terms like social realism, social justice, social constructivism, social psychology and social capital imply that there is some social process involved or considered, a process that is not there in regular, "non-social", realism, justice, constructivism, psychology, or capital.

The adjective "social" is also used often in political discourse, although its meaning in such a context depends heavily on who is using it. In left-wing circles it is often used to imply a positive characteristic, while in right-wing circles it is generally used to imply a negative characteristic. It should also be noted that, overall, this adjective is used much more often by those on the political left than by those on the political right. For these reasons, those seeking to avoid association with the left-right political debates often seek to label their work with phrases that do not include the word "social".

When we talk about 'social business' or 'social media' we are using the primary meaning, more or less the way an anthropologist would use it, not as a politician would, or the way a matchmaker would. We are not talking about holding hands or flirting, here, but the deep workings of people in various cultural settings.

So we need to dispel this confusion, every time it arises.

tags: #social

Thinking Outside The Head: The Structure of DNA, And The Future Of The Social Web?

I am reading Richard Ogle's Smart World, and I am strongly moved by his notion of idea-spaces: the premise that we rely on external systems and collections of cross-correlated ideas to help us think. In effect, Ogle argues, we can't really think without them. We can't think mathematically without Arabic numerals, or productively reason about most things without sophisticated, culturally embedded models that we share with others, like macro economics, French sauces, or fabricating computer chips.

He makes the case for idea-spaces, and the benefits of crossing from one to another, in a section dedicated to Watson and Crick's discovery about the structure of DNA:

None of the other main protagonists came close to emulating Crick's skill in weaving back and forth between the genetic and the molecular, the informational and the physical, letting each play against the other until the tin end results, code and double helix, finally emerged in a harmonious unity. Even a maverick mind like Watson's couldn't match Crick's ability not only to move with ease between multiple idea-spaces -- physical chemistry, biochemistry, X-ray crystallography, mathematics, and genetics -- but also, on a higher level, to constantly allow the informational and physical dimensions of the problem to act as mutual frames for one another.

The odd thing is how little Crick did himself. This wasn't just a matter of others fashioning key parts of the puzzle for him (thought in several places they did). Rather, it was that once key ideas from idea-spaces that otherwise had little contact with one another were connected, they began, quasi-autonomously, to make new sense in terms of one another, leading to the emergence of a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. [...] Whole patterns of embedded intelligence engaged with one another, moving in a kind of back-and-forth dance of mutual influence, until eventually something wholly new emerged. Without taking any of ther credit away from Crick, we can truthfully say that much of the time, it was the dynamic interplay of spaces of ideas that was doing the thinking.

I think the same sort of externalization of reasoning and the use of 'embedded intelligence' is the key to how we will continue to be able to make sense of the torrents of information streaming past us on the web.

We will develop new idea-spaces -- new metaphors and models of how information and social systems interact -- and extend the notions of embedded intelligence into better tools and larger networks of people who likewise participate in the construction and use of these idea-spaces. We will think more and more outside our own heads, relying on the greater mind we are only a part of.

tags: #richardogle, #idea-spaces, #embeddedintelligence

Weinberger: The Opposite Of 'Open' Is 'Theirs'

Weinberger beautifully nails the true value of an open web (or Net): it rmains ours.

The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.

If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.

So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”

via www.hyperorg.com

This reminds me of piece I wrote last year, Web Culture: Identity, Belonging, And Scalar Freedom:

[...] people are discovering all over again, that connection to other people around issues that matter can become the defining source of happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation -- being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’ has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from music, movie, publishing, and television factories.

Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads. If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.

Post-everything will mean embracing something we know will involve us, leaving behind our second-class status as members of the mass audience, and become living, active participants in a new culture.

tags: #davidweinberger, #webculture, #openweb

In Good Company

 

Defining Social Business

Preparing for the O'Reilly panel today organized and moderated by Josh Ross on the topic of social business.

The first question, aside from background of the panelists, will be "Please define social business."

My short answer is 'Social Business' denotes businesses organized around social networks and the use of social technologies to support them.

A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web.

But it really is larger than that. 

A social business is an organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web, including social media, social networks, and a long list of other advances.

The context for business has changed dramatically in recent years -- a shifting global economic climate, accelerating need for sustainable opeartions, and a political and societal demand for increased openness and transparency in business. Add to that the implacable impact of the social web, which is changing the way people interact and perceive the world and their place in it, and which has already drastically changed media and society.

The combination of these forces is already changing business operations. Once businesses have intentionally reconsidered their core premises -- how to innovate and prosper -- in light of the real-time social web and the new context for business, we can expect a profound reformulation of business operations, technologies, and culture. 

Einstein stated, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." I maintain that a new sort of business is needed to fix the mess that 20th century business has created.

Metaphorically, a social business will seem more like a village than an army, and where a lot of 20th management approaches will be obsolete. We can expect these features:

• ubiquitous use of social tools, and social networks,
• greater levels of personal autonomy,
• self-organization of groups and projects,
• very porous boundaries with the world, 
• high reliance on non-financial motivation, or personal meaning and purpose,
• internal marketplaces for ideas and talent,
• and senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats. 

As Gibson said, 'The future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed.'

Over the next ten years, we will see companies in a staggeringly wide distribution of these and other related characteristics. Some will seem like companies straight out of The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, while others will have moved so far along these lines that they almost don't seem to be 'businesses' in the conventional sense. Social businesses may seem more like communities, movements, or religions than what we think of as businesses, currently.

Irrationalizing E2.0, SCRM, And Social Business

Dennis Howlett thinks he Rationalizing the E2.0, SCRM, social business discussion but mostly he's just confusing me.

He pulls together some anecdotes of conversations with Doc Searls and Euan Semple, a few paragraphs of Brian Solis's disastrously named Social Darwinism piece, various thoughts about what SAP users do and do not want to do with their software purchases, and a bunch of other stuff. But I don't get how this leads to the conclusion:

Finally, when thinking about E2.0/SCRM, pay attention to the way in which organizational change occurs in the context of nuanced cultures. Don’t be constrained by one or other theory simply because it makes for an attractive sounding buzz phrase. Without that, much of what passes for this new way of thinking will be lost.

Huh?

'How change occurs in the context of nuanced cultures'? Aren't all cultures nuanced? 

'Don't be contrained by one or another theory simply because it makes for an attractive sounding buzz phrase." I guess that means we should reject theories that have attractive sounding names? Shouldn't we judge theories on what we gain from using them? On how they help us think? Not based on what they are called, right?

I would turn this around on Dennis. When thinking about the impacts of social tools and practices on the business world, think about how cultures adopt new things rather than how they resist them. Don't be blinded by an obsession with how things work today or worked ten years ago, and don't presume that new practices and tools won't be adopted because they are new and have new names. Without that, much of what is new -- new thinking, new tools, new practices -- will remain outside your awareness.

tags: #socialbusiness, #enterprise2.0, #socialcrm, #briansolis, #docsearls, #euansemple

Social Business Meetup 20 Jan 2010 in NYC

It's last minute, I know, but I am bumping more people in NYC who are interested in the Social Business event, so I figured I would pull together a meetup for next Wednesday, 20 Jan 2010, at 6:30pm.

Location:

Pete's Tavern

129 East 18th Street

New York, NY 10003-2401

Get Directions

(212) 473-7676

Let me if you're coming by registering here: http://twtvite.com/ekhf71

Graham Hill, who I haven't heard of before, has posted a Manifesto For Social Business. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but will follow up.

Social Business Edge: 19 April 2010 New York City

I am happy to announce that the planning for the Social Business event I have been talking about for several months is moving ahead well.

The long awaited new website is up, at www.edgewards.com/sbe. (Note that this is also the launch of the Edgewards website, a new experimental collective focused on creating events that matter.)

In the revision of the site, I have also changed the name of the event to better reflect the Edgewards goals, and so the new name is Social Business Edge.

We have settled on a date -- 19 April 2010 -- and are working on a venue in New York City. We had announced 20 April 2010 a few weeks ago, but that was an error. I plan to announce the venue in a week at the most. We are in discussion with several locations.

I am serving as director and host of the day long 'show'. We are loosely basing the format on late night TV, but I don't expect that we will have a NBC/Leno/O'Brien mess! I am adamant about cutting through the stuffiness and staleness of most events, and late night TV is much more modern.

Note also that sponsors will be showing ads that run during the event: not during breaks, but in the gaps when guests are coming and going.

Dachis Group is a Gold sponsor, and we are talking to many other companies about participating.

I have been joined by a group of stellar contributors, who have formed a swarm to help think through the event, spark ideas, and recommend other folks to get involved. These include Lee Byrant and Sarah Kennon, who are both co-hsoting with me, as well as Euan Semple, Jamais Cascio, Gia Lyons, Adina Levin, Jeff Dachis, Tim Young, Beth Kanter, Umair Haque, John Winsor, Kevin Marks and Venkatesh Rao. Jeff Pulver is the show's producer.

I invite anyone who has interest in the impact that social tools are having on the world of business to join up at the site to create a profile, be automatically informed when new posts are created, participate in the Social Business Forum there. And of course, plan on attending the conference! I will be setting up a conference registration page at the end of the week. 

On Jan 26 I will be cohosting a meetup in San Francisco with Sarah Kennon, to meet with interested parties, and to enjoy pizza and wine (at Zuppa, I think). Please leave a comment on this post at the site if you are interested in attending.

Looking forward to hearing what your thoughts are about Social Business Edge. Let's get busy!

tags: #sbe, #socialbusiness, #socialbusinessedge, #edgewards

Technotranscendentalism

Kevin Kelly as interviewed by Andrew Lawler for The Orion, recently:

KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy. These are not two words that most people normally associate with each other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring
them together.

LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?

KELLY: Right.

LAWLER: But can you really imagine Thoreau multitasking on a BlackBerry? How do you relate transcendentalism to technology?

KELLY: I don’t mean transcendentalist in a monkish or hermitlike way. I mean transcending in the sense of connecting to a state of awareness, of living, of being, that transcends our day-to-day life. It’s not a withdrawal, it’s an emergence. And tools can be used.

LAWLER: Or misused.

KELLY: There’s been a lot of chatter about information overload recently. It is true there’s something different about this [modern] environment in our day-to-day and minute-to-minute awareness. What it means and what we should do about it is really not so clear.

I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it. The proliferation of devices is necessary to learn new things. And the cost of learning new things is an avalanche of fragmented information. We just have to learn how to live with it.

LAWLER: But don’t we get to choose?

KELLY: It’s not that we don’t have the option to remove ourselves. This phase of cultural evolution, in which we are growing and discovering, requires this tide of twenty-four-hour information. I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option. We want to encourage that diversity, but it will always be a niche. Barring some disaster, society is not going to become a world where everybody stays at home writing poems and reading one long book after another without interruption.

LAWLER: Where is the transcendentalism in this view?

KELLY: The roots of technology go deeper than just human culture. They weave and string all the way back to the Big Bang. Technology is an example—like life and intelligence—of an extropic system, a system that feeds off entropy to build order. And not just order, but self-amplifying order of exploding complexity and depth. Extropic systems create even more entropy in the process—that is, energy runs through the system at a faster and denser pace. This is the definition of self-sustaining systems like a living organism. There’s continuity from the beginning of the universe, which is expanding out and creating space to allow diversity to flourish.

What we have is a long-term trend of increasing diversity, complexity, and specialization—all characteristics of self-sustaining systems. That could be a galaxy or a sun or intelligence. The resulting density of power is technology. I use the term “the Technium.” A galaxy is a system composed of individual technologies, complex enough to have its own self-sustaining qualities including self-preservation. It is self-perpetuating and self-increasing. You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology—that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.

LAWLER: Other than to reproduce, what is the purpose of these systems?

KELLY: These systems are evolving evolution. They are increasing degrees of freedom. And this is the theological part—we have the infinite game. The game is to extend the game, so that the game will keep going. The game is to keep changing the nature of change. And that infinite game is my view of holiness. You play the game not to win, but to continue to play to make room for all expressions of truth, good, and the beautiful. You are opening up the world to possibility. Every child born on Earth today has some particular mixture of genes and environment, of capability and intelligence to unleash. The game is about trying to educate that individual into a position where they can maximize their potential and possibility. And technology is the instrument.

via www.orionmagazine.org

Kelly's Technotranscentalism is somewhere to the west of the neo Taoism (or Tao Lite) that I espouse. Tao Lite which is more of a nature religion, based on how the world works. His TT is more focused on the growing noosphere: the game of evolution. He is more of a progressivist, stressing the evolution and wave front of change. New Taoism focuses on the changeless, steady state of natural laws. But these are two sides of the same coin.

tags: #kevinkelly, #technotranscendentalism, #newtaoism, #taolite, #overload

Yet Another The-Internet-Is-Making-Us-Stupid Article

This article by some staff writer at the SF Chronical doesn't even try to counter these 'experts' who are telling the fearful Sunday supplement readers that the Internet is worse than playing college football: we are losing IQ points by the minute!

In today's fast-paced, multitasking world, it's easy to get hooked on technology that's always online, delivering a steady stream of texts and tweets.

But some mental health experts fear that a growing technology addiction, perhaps accelerated by the popularity of smart phones and social networks, will lead to a breakdown of interpersonal relationships and an increase in attention deficit disorder.

"If our attention span constricts to the point where we can only take information in 140-character sentences, then that doesn't bode too well for our future," said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford University's Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University.

"The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets," Aboujaoude said, "the less patient we will be with more complex, more meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with any depth and nuance. Like any skill, if you don't use it, you lose it."

Dr. John Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, uses the term "acquired attention deficit disorder" to describe the way technology is rewiring the modern brain.

via Benny Evangelista,  www.sfgate.com

There is not a single mention that anyone anywhere disagrees with this drivel. There is not one scientist discussing the positives of web-based sociality, the increased executive function in the brains of those 'reading critically' online, the opportunities for creativity and collaboration by 'thinking outside your own head'. Nothing.

Thanks Benny! Great fact-based reporting there!

[via @finiteattention, Why experts are morons: a recipe for academic success]

tags: #aadd, #Aboujaoude, #theinternetismakingusdumb

Doing That Crazy Hand Jive: Gesture And The Future Of User Experience

The technology industry is going retro — moving away from remote controls, mice and joysticks to something that arrives without batteries, wires or a user manual.

It’s called a hand.

In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people to flip channels on the TV or move documents on a computer monitor with simple hand gestures. The technology, one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s, was being shown in private sessions during the immense Consumer Electronics Show here last week. Past attempts at similar technology have proved clunky and disappointing. In contrast, the latest crop of gesture-powered devices arrives with a refreshing surprise: they actually work.

[...]

Just as Microsoft’s gaming system hits the market, so should TVs from Hitachi in Japan that will let people turn on their screens, scan through channels and change the volume on their sets with simple hand motions. Laptops and other computers should also arrive later this year with built-in cameras that can pick up similar gestures. Such technology could make today’s touch-screen tools obsolete as people use gestures to control, for instance, the playback or fast-forward of a DVD.

To bring these gesture functions to life, device makers needed to conquer what amounts to one of computer science’s grand challenges. Electronics had to see the world around them in fine detail through tiny digital cameras. Such a task meant giving a TV, for example, a way to identify people sitting on a couch and to recognize a certain hand wave as a command and not a scratching of the nose.

Little things like the sun, room lights and people’s annoying habit of doing the unexpected stood as just some of the obstacles companies had to overcome.

GestureTek, with offices in Silicon Valley and Ottawa, has spent a quarter-century trying to perfect its technology and has enjoyed some success. It helps TV weather people, museums and hotels create huge interactive displays.

This past work, however, has relied on limited, standard cameras that perceive the world in two dimensions. The major breakthrough with the latest gesture technology comes through the use of cameras that see the world in three dimensions, adding that crucial layer of depth perception that helps a computer or TV recognize when someone tilts their hand forward or nods their head.

via Ashee Vance, www.nytimes.com

This advance is one of several that will form the basis of an entirely new experience for computing.

Gestural UI, or 'hand jive' as I call it, once deployed as a built in aspect of future computers, like touchpads and mouses are today, will set the stage for a rethink about user experience.

First we will see hand jive as a way to manipulate the gears of now-tradition windowed UIs: pulling down a menu in an app, moving windows around, dragging a file to the trash.

In the future, we'll have real Minority Report stuff, without the enormous touch screens: we'll also see the emergence of augmented reality goggles -- Terminator goggles -- where we can toggle back and forth between 100% computer screen sorts of display to 100% augmented reality. And the goggles -- as an integrated part of the computing device -- will be watching our hands for commands, and watching the world for reality to augment.

The combination of these trends will make computing primarily mobile: we'll have an iPhone sized device we carry all the time, which will be a phone and a PC. We will be free of LCD screens -- in general -- courtesy of our goggles, and free of keyboards, courtesy of hand jive. A keyboard can be imaged on any flat surface by the goggles, and we can type without a physical keyboard because the gestural system is watching our fingers in 3D. And of course, a lot of things could be done without typing, especially once kids start using sign language and voice to communicate with computers. (I say kids because that's who start first.)

The other parts of this tectonic shift in UX will include the end of the document-centric folder/file/desktop metaphor, where information in managed in documents, based on old school filing cabinets. I believe that innovation like the Litl OS, which has shifted to a TV-influenced UI of channels, treating information as something that flows and not something static, sitting in a document.

And of course, the social web will be the foundation of future computing, as opposed to a document-centric world in which people are an afterthought.

How To Hand Jive

via Ehow

tags: #handjive, #gesture, #litl, #minorityreport, #terminatorgoggles, #augmentedreality, #deathofdocuments, #handUI, #projectnatal, #microsoft

One Example Of Tweeting Your Blog Posts

This is the Twitter cascade so far on my recent post, The False Question Of Attention Economics, just as an example to support the earlier post, Threading Blog And Twitter Streams Together:

iART @iA_Chris: Big post of the weekend, for those who missed it http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics RT @stoweboyd

iA_ChrisBig post of the weekend, for those who missed it http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics RT @stoweboyd

Brandon101RT @stoweboyd: Big post of the weekend, for those who missed it http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics

papadimitriouRT @stoweboyd: Big post of the weekend, for those who missed it

http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics

dominiekRT @stoweboyd: Big post of the weekend, for those who missed it http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics

thejordanrulesInteresting post, w/ great examples, suggesting some considerations when dealing with attention & information overload: http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

quickzenThe false question of attention economics: http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2010/01/the-false-question-of-attention-economics.html

footenotesWorth reading RT @stoweboyd http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics

heleana_quarteyRT @stoweboyd: Big post of the weekend, for those who missed it http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics

stoweboydBig post of the weekend, for those who missed it http://sto.ly/8R3Mab The False Question Of Attention Economics

joiningdotsChallenging Attention Economics http://is.gd/63lfe We've been here before (and why comments about Internet ruining our brains are annoying)

PR_infoReading: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/6gAB4g by @stoweboyd

grzewapThe False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message - http://bit.ly/7vtFP0

SanderKwgInformative article on past, present and future of attention economics & information overload: http://bit.ly/5fozEF

franwessWorth a read: The False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://bit.ly/6pLtjZ

marcocagnottiThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://j.mp/6gAB4g

karthurThe false question of attention economics: good contrarian viewpoint from @stoweboyd http://j.mp/8Xp2nQ (via @vanderbeeken)

karthurThe false question of attention economics: good article by @stoweboyd http://j.mp/8Xp2nQ (via @vanderbeeken)

bvladA must read RT @simoncollister The False Question Of Attention Economics http://ff.im/-e7aqn

simoncollisterThe False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://ff.im/-e7aqn

AJdigitalFocusThe False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://bit.ly/4N7lIU

mcombs67RT @tompsee: "The False Question Of Attention Economics " great piece on the plague of information. http://bit.ly/4YTD7a thanks bill!

WDFuhrmanAccomodate reality RT @Armano I'm too busy to digest this. Anyone want to give me a summary in 140 chars or less? http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

barbchamberlainIn no era have we had enough time for everything we'd like to do/know/experience. We'll be OK anyway. For @Armano http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

bixbyknolls"The False Question Of Attention Economics " An enlightening piece on the plague of information. http://bit.ly/4YTD7a I love this piece!

tompsee"The False Question Of Attention Economics " An enlightening piece on the plague of information. http://bit.ly/4YTD7a I love this piece!

markefrankdon't totally agree. we have lost quiet, and some form of nature, makes nonstop 'searching' less productive in my mind. http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

futuristzachRT @SteveKoss The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4YTD7a @SmartCityTalk

elmberg"Attention economy är inget nytt" Läsvärd argumentation, men det håller ej. Artikeln kom ju via Twitter (@deeped) http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

SteveKossThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4YTD7a Keep experimenting & cooking, don’t be a boiled frog via @SmartCityTalk

LocMarketplaceThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4YTD7a Keep experimenting & cooking, don’t be a boiled frog via @SmartCityTalk

stefanomaggi.@Armano we should build cultural tools like human feed to keep up with all the information sources & filter signals http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

designlearningWe suffer from technology induced attention deficit disorder, bright and shiny object syndrome and short term memory loss http://is.gd/61L7h

emoticommaMore on same RT @Armano: I'm too busy to digest this. Anyone want to give me a summary in 140 chars or less? http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

emoticommaFood for thought: The False Question of Attention Economics @StoweBoyd responds to David @Armano. http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

7GRERT @Armano: I'm too busy to digest this. Anyone want to give me a summary in 140 chars or less? http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

timgierRT @Armano: I'm too busy to digest this. Anyone want to give me a summary in 140 chars or less? http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

RogervonOech@Armano "Anyone want to give me a summary in 140 chars or less? http://bit.ly/4YTD7a " David: SIMPLFY: http://j.mp/cwp221

cpetersiaIt seems that @stoweboyd and @hello_world are talking past each other, on a serious topic http://bit.ly/8Q1aw5

ArmanoI'm too busy to digest this. Anyone want to give me a summary in 140 chars or less? http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

RSSirteubalThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://ow.ly/16j8xm

tommylHow can we cope with huge amounts of info coming our way? Experiment with presentation; plasticity; give it time. http://bit.ly/6gAB4g

JasonSpectorThe False Question Of Attention Economics - http://bit.ly/6XFGVF

acci0The False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://ff.im/-e6p3N

travispillowGreat read. Challenges my current view of the social Web I've mostly opted out of. http://bit.ly/694G4n via @macloo

barebebsThe False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://bit.ly/90XPBp

GottaBlogMeMessage: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://tinyurl.com/y8txmax

bibliothekarinRT @RoyKenagy: Stowe Boyd: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4XucP0 Information overload is all in our minds...

scottRcrawford@pkedrosky @stoweboyd Interesting parallels in connections http://sto.ly/8R3Mab and collections http://bit.ly/5gtgaK ;overload v hoarding.

oyKenagyStowe Boyd: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4XucP0 Information overload is all in our minds...

tliebscherInteressante Diskussion von @stoweboyd zu Attention Economics http://bit.ly/6gAB4g vor dem Hintergrund des beginnenden 6. #Kondratieff

jagbirsinghseoThe False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://bit.ly/8reTIbmanneVery interesting read! RT @deeped: The False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://ff.im/-e5QnW

deepedThe False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message http://ff.im/-e5QnW

richardkendallRT @macloo: Good read: RT @marcusod "Rise of social web not abt end of what came be4 - starting point 4 what comes next http://bit.ly/694G4n

BuzzbootThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://su.pr/72x4q7

vjeanneperrier“Good read: RT @marcusod "Rise of social web not abt end of what came be4 - starting point 4 what comes next" http://bit.ly/694G4n ” -@macloo

maclooGood read: RT @marcusod "Rise of social web not abt end of what came be4 - starting point 4 what comes next" http://bit.ly/694G4n

MarkoMinkaThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://cli.gs/tQbhWs Information overload and attention scarcity - good, or a bad thing?

marcusod"Need to construct new more complex cultural tools.. & new societal norms & structres to assist us in using" social web http://bit.ly/694G4n

marcusodInsightful post from @stoweboyd on info overload meme. The experiment has just begun. http://bit.ly/694G4n

rpbatchAECRT @stoweboyd: for those that missed it: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab

Me: interesting perspective

brianoberkirchBoth @stoweboyd (http://bit.ly/5AgjJk ) & @rafer (http://bit.ly/5Fd4I3 ) calling out the attention poverty meme.

mbjornGood morning Stowe! Tanks for resending The False Question of Attention Economics. http://sto.ly/8R3Mab great post

stoweboydfor those that missed it: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab overload, schmoverload

vadnufinds the discussion of information overload vs development of culture quite long-haired but interesting - http://bit.ly/4YTD7a

juleniturbeEtiquetado The False Question Of Attention Economics - /Message: http://bit.ly/6LctwR

cgoble72Interesting article on whether social network cause info overload. Idea - 10 years to adjust. http://tinyurl.com/yf3hyu3

pr_marketingThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/7DZGpr #postrank #marketing

aDogNamedPants"there is no scarcity of attention" from @stoweboyd http://bit.ly/69NhoD. Well now Im going to have to re-write a bunch of blog posts...

amandachapelNEW AGE FAUX INTELLECTUAL ADDS MORE EFFLUVIA TO WEB2 ETHER - "@stoweboyd: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab ."

rodpenoThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/7HyARe #in

bodamgaardRT @stoweboyd: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab - We'll solve overload culturally through a richer social web

bodamgaardRT @stoweboyd: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab We'll solve overload culturally through a richer social web

kelvin8048The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4UtBad

timkastelleThought-provoking postRT @jonhusband: RT @stoweboyd The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/4XBXPn

scottRcrawfordRT @stoweboyd: now now @Armano don't be lazy. A nice Sunday morning read http://sto.ly/8R3Mab

media2The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/6PlUE9

stoweboydnow now @Armano don't be lazy. A nice Sunday morning read http://sto.ly/8R3Mab

socialmediajsThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/8hclIX #news #socialmedia

lammiiaA good read: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://ow.ly/UC9f

sfsocialmediaThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/8kDbXG #news #socialmedia

sfsmjobshootThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/8kDbXG #news #socialmedia

timyoungRT @stoweboyd: The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab We'll solve overload culturally through a richer social web

stoweboydhey @armano @hello_world I refer to recent posts of yours in The False Question Of Attention Economics http://bit.ly/8R3Mab

jonhusbandRT @stoweboyd The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab We'll solve culturally thru richer social web { will take time

stoweboydThe False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab We'll solve overload culturally through a richer social web

via bit.ly

And the Stats:

 

Note that Monday seems to be heading toward just as many clicks as on Saturday, the first day it was posted. So, if you write a big chewy piece on the weekend, be sure to tweet about it (again) Monday.

tags: #blogging, #twitter

Threading Blog And Twitter Streams Together

Stuart had some interesting observations about my recent posts on Ditching Technorati Tags:

Stowe, I ditched Technorati some years ago (feels like years). I have found I really want two titles now. The title for my blog post and the title for my Tweet. Which means right now I add a #hashtag or @name into my blog title. As the title is always a tweet. Adding #hashtags into the end of a post or even upfront would be interesting. Perhaps more so if you used the SEO type functionality that is available. However, too much thinking doesn't help tags much. I use Delicious still as a bookmark service and the tags potentially help me find some article I want later... but really again it is not all that useful. I'm also starting to consolidate categories for it keeps me more focused. What's probably relevant is we see a blog today as a super tweet. It may be more thoughtful.. it may be a title or one liner supported by more detailed notes. It's just more valuable sharing it via Twitter than most anywhere else.

I agree that I, too, have started to consider blog posts as a pair: the blog post and the Twitter post that I use to carry the link out into the stream. That tweet is like a needle and thread, sewing the two streams together -- the shared and fast stream of Twitter, and the slower, publishing-style stream at my blog. 

Stuart has gone a step farther than me, considering the blog post title as being the same as the accompanying tweet. I still contrive a different tweet, usually one with some come on: a peek into the subject of the post or my feelings about the topic.

For example, the post on Saturday about attention economics and overload was called 'The False Question of Attention Economics'. Crafting that title took some time: I think I changed it four or five times before settling, and I think its works on a number of levels.

One of the levels that it works on is that it is short enough to fit in a tweet with room left over for a short URL and a one-liner about the post. So they usually have this form:

[original title] [shortened URL] [quip]

I posted this tweet, which follows the form exactly.

The False Question Of Attention Economics http://sto.ly/8R3Mab We'll solve overload culturally through a richer social web

And another example:

Its Only Blurry When You Expect It To Be Clear: Generational Multitasking http://sto.ly/4FRdht younger kids multitask more

Occasionally, the title is so snarky that there is no need for a quip, as in this case:

The Recession Is Over. I Feel So Much Better, Mr Summers. Thank You. http://sto.ly/7ctPDQ

Regarding tags: as I said in the post that Stuart responded to , I have decided to ditch Technorati tags. For those that haven't fooled with them directly, Technorati tags are just an HTML href that point to corresponding pages at the Technorati website, like "http://technorati.com/tag/spaghetti" or "http://technorati.com/tag/bicycles".

Hashtags, like '#futureshock' or '#mcluhan' are not HTML. They are strictly text, a form of microsyntax, like pronouns in English sentences. They intended to convey the idea that the tagged writing is about the topic that the tag represents. And that indication is available to human readers immediately, or for various search tools that might seek out tags in tweets or posts, and use them as a significantly more relevant handle for indexing than other words in the text.

So if I had thought to include it, the second example about could have read:

Its Only Blurry When You Expect It To Be Clear: Generational Multitasking http://sto.ly/4FRdht younger kids #multitask more

However, I forgot to include the tag.

Stuart might have written the original title with a hashtag includedm so the tweet would have looked like this

Its Only Blurry When You Expect It To Be Clear: Generational #Multitasking http://sto.ly/4FRdht younger kids #multitask more

So the tags are an additional way that the blog post and the tweet are linked, but that's a weaker connection, since the connection is one of membership in the set of posts and tweets that are tagged #multitasking. On the other hand, there is a very tight connection between a tweet that has a URL referencing a particular post and the post itself. That's the strongest tie.

Stuart has jumped ahead to thinking of blogging as, more or less, the place we create long format writing (or other creative works, like video, audio, etc.) in order to drop it into the faster stream. The slower stream of blogs is just a tributary to the faster, more social stream in Twitter (and other highly social streaming applications like Twitter, too).

tags: #stuarthenshall, #twitter, #blogging, #hashtags, #microsyntax, #socialmedia

Its Only Blurry When You Expect It To Be Clear: Generational Multitasking

The generational divide is multitasking?

Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of the coming “Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn,” has also drawn this distinction between what he calls the Net Generation, born in the 1980s, and the iGeneration, born in the ’90s and this decade.

Now in their 20s, those in the Net Generation, according to Dr. Rosen, spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks.

Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won’t have the patience for anything less.

“They’ll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,” he said. “They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not.”

The boom of kid-focused virtual worlds and online games like Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters especially intrigues Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist and associate researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Dr. Ito said that children who play these games would see less of a distinction between their online friends and real friends; virtually socializing might be just as fulfilling as a Friday night party. And they would be more likely to participate actively in their own entertainment, clicking at the keyboard instead of leaning back on the couch.

That could give them the potential to be more creative than older generations — and perhaps make them a more challenging target for corporate marketers. “It’s certainly no longer true that kids are just blindly consuming what commercial culture has to offer,” Dr. Ito said.

Another bubbling intra-generational gap, as any modern parent knows, is that younger children tend to be ever more artful multitaskers. Studies performed by Dr. Rosen at Cal State show that 16- to 18-year-olds perform seven tasks, on average, in their free time — like texting on the phone, sending instant messages and checking Facebook while sitting in front of the television.

People in their early 20s can handle only six, Dr. Rosen found, and those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

That versatility is great when they’re killing time, but will a younger generation be as focused at school and work as their forebears?

“I worry that young people won’t be able to summon the capacity to focus and concentrate when they need to,” said Vicky Rideout, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which will release a sweeping survey on the technology and media habits of children and teenagers this month.

Children my daughter’s age are also more likely to have some relaxed notions about privacy. The idea of a phone or any other device that is persistently aware of its location and screams out its geographic coordinates, even if only to friends, might seem spooky to older age groups.

But the newest batch of Internet users and cellphone owners will find these geo-intelligent tools to be e

via Brad Stone, The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s, www.nytimes.com

The more we are exposed to media, the more it slips into being #non-rivalrous: we can attend to it while attending to other media, too.

I love that the first question that Stone pursues, after he mentions research showing that younger kids can multitask more than the older cadre, is whether it will impact their focus at work and school.

Isn't it self-evident that we are creating a world in which #multitasking is going to be the norm? And kids are adapting to the world they see.

Why Online Is A Better Place For News

 

The NY Times ran a short post (it's not an article: they are getting hip to the stream) with a PDF link. The graphic was too big to be displayed otherwise, I guess. Normally they just have a 'click to see expanded image' but now they are taking it a step farther.

They ran the same thing last February, but I didn't notice then.

#onlinenews, #nytimes

Why blogging will (still) change the world

With a blog you have more reason to think. Having an outlet for your ideas makes you take them more seriously. Even if you never publish the posts, taking your ideas seriously and thinking harder about them is a good thing.

If you write a half decent blog post you will make someone else think. You may make them think you are wrong or you may make them think you are right but you will make them think.

via www.euansemple.com

The only way to change the world = one mind at a time.

Ditching Technorati Tags

I really don't know what progress #Technorati is making in their new push to become a media company, but I am dropping Technorati #tags from all my blogging.

I think they squandered a real chance to make 'tagspaces' that would be helpful to the web. But even if they had done that, I might still be advocating a move to embedded tags.

So I am going to switch to #hashtags, in line, from now on. I presume that search tools will work in the appropriate way. There is no reason to create hundreds of links a week pointing at Technorati that no one ever uses.

Don’t worry. You aren’t overwhelmed; you are just obsolete.

via rafer.tumblr.com

Why Palm Will Die

How does Palm (PALM) view Apple (AAPL)?

“We don’t pay that much attention to Apple….I know it sounds really strange,” says Rubinstein.

“Really?” Kara replies. “You don’t worry about the iPhone?”

“No, I really don’t,” Rubinstein answers.

“I don’t believe you,” says Kara, telegraphing a sentiment I imagine is widely held among the audience. Rubinstein is sometimes referred to as “the father of the iPod.” Hard to imagine he doesn’t have at least a passing interest in the evolution of the device he helped create.

Rubinstein: “I don’t have an iPhone. I’ve never even used one.”

I think I just heard Palm’s entire PR team groan. If only Kara had an iPhone in her pocket that she could offer Rubinstein–”Come on, touch it.” No such luck, though. Too bad Rep. Joe Wilson’s not in the audience …

via digitaldaily.allthingsd.com

I was in Barcelona two years ago when Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the CEO of Nokia, offered similar annoyed nonchalance about the iPhone. And Nokia has seen its US market share plummet in the years since.

Anyone who downplays the impact that iPhone has had on the mobile world is cracked. More importantly, Apple is the first to make a mobile device that successfully unites PC hardware, web services, and a mobile always connected device. Palm can't play in that space. Microsoft is failing, and Google is the only ascendant competitor.

I am predicting that Palm will be acquired by some wannabe company, like HP, LG, or a Chinese steel company that wants to get into cell phones.

The False Question Of Attention Economics

A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web. So, here at start of 2010, a new decade, I will try to write a short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive science/anthropology angle.

But first let me recount the two pieces that prodded me to this.

David Armano wrote a piece called The Human Feed: How People Filter Signal From Noise:

In the earlier days of the internet, the Web became a place quickly saturated with information and we needed something to beat the information into submission. Search engines were born—and as a result the internet became more productive.  Today, the internet is still about information—but it's also about attention. There is a surplus of information, and a meta surplus of marketing in every form. For individuals, we are experiencing the opposite. We have a deficit in attention.

We've long exceeded the capacity of information that we can absorb and retain. We all suffer from technology induced attention deficit disorder, bright and shiny object syndrome and short term memory loss.

Bookmarks don't help—now we need tools like del.icio.us.  And of course we need Google more than ever. And there's once more thing we need. We need each other to make sense of it all. We need a Web with a human touch to help guide us through the fragmented, landscape of the internet. And that's where the human feed comes in. If you sign up to a service like Twitter, Friendfeed, or even subscribe to the del.ico.us links of real live people who you trust and look to for insights, you'll find that a wealth of information will be brought right to you vs. you having to go out and hunt for it.

 
David Armano

Just for history's sake, the origin of the 'poverty of attention' meme was Herbert Simon, way back in 1971:

...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

 
Herbert Simon

Likewise, just around the same time as Herbert's comment, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, in which he suggests that the speed up of modern society was basically driving us crazy, like soldiers suffering from shell shock, now called combat stress reaction. In other words, "too much change in too short a period of time." One major component of future shock -- to which he ascribes most of the major problems of our day -- is information overload: too much information to make sense of, with the implied context of a future shock sped-up world.

 

And, going for the oldest philosophical natterings about this, Diderot, in 1755 wrote,

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

 
Denis Diderot by Louis-Michel van Loo

So, Armano has joined that long list of philosophers, suggesting that there is too much to grasp, things are going too fast, and the techniques that we have used in the past are failing.

Another post, this one by Thomas Peterson, makes more or less the same case, although employing the stark metaphor Slaves of the Feed to suggest we have become entrapped by our tools:

Let’s start with what most people probably can agree. Information is accumulating online. The amount of available information is increasing at an exponential rate, some say it doubles every second year. This mean that any illusion of being able to stay up to date with everything that is going on is utopian and has been probably since Guttenberg invented the press.

Most people know this, yet that is exactly exactly what we all seem to be doing.

There is no shortage of content aggregators and aggregators of aggregators, daily developed to give us a better overview of all the sources of information we have subscribed to and found ourselves now depending on.

This has resulted in an endless stream of articles, news, pictures, websites, products, updates, comments of updates and comments to these comments, being delivered to us second by second that each of us have to deal with.

Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of interest, something that we can share with our networks, something that we can use, something that we can talk about, something that we can act on, something we didn’t know we didn’t know.

It almost seems like an obsession and many critics of digital technology would argue that by consuming information this way we are running the danger of destroying social interaction between humans. One might even say that we have become slaves of the feed.

 

At every point in human history there have been philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in society and culture.

This thread of Western philosophical discourse -- attention scarcity, future shock, information overload -- has become the conventional wisdom. It seems to be based on unassailable and unshakable logic. But what is that logic?

The framing of the argument includes the unspoken premise that once upon a time in some hypothetical past attention wasn't scarce, we didn't suffer from too much information, and we had all the time in the world to reason about the world, our place in it, and therefore to make wise and grounded decisions. 

But my reading of human history suggests the opposite. In the pre-industrial world, business people and governments still suffered from incomplete information, and the pace of life always seemed faster than what had gone on in earlier times. At every point in human history there have been philosophers claiming that the current civilization has fallen from an earlier halcyon state, that the ways of the ancients had been lost, and modern innovations and practices threatened to destroy all that was good in society and culture. 

So, this is merely the most recent spin on an ancient theme, as the Diderot quote indicates.

Imagine for a moment that it is true -- there was an idyllic time back in the Garden of Eden -- when we knew all that was necessary to know, and we had all the time in the world to make decisions. Maybe. I am betting it is a shadow of our psychology, the same sort of magical thought that believes in guardian angels and reincarnation. Just a slightly more intellectual superstition.

Another thread of this argument is that human beings don't have the capacity to winnow out the information we need given the torrent of information streaming past, which is in a sense Diderot's conjecture. But we really don't know what we are capable of, honestly.

The human mind is exceptionally plastic, especially when young people are exposed to media and symbolic information systems at an early age. This is why those that take up the study of music, or programming, or karate at a young age, and study for 10,000 hours gain mastery of these skills, which can be accomplished before reaching 20 years of age. And even older people can have significant improvements in cognitive skills -- like juggling or flight simulation games -- with relative small exposure.

I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways, and once we start to do so, it will like take 10 years (the 10,000 hour rule again) before anyone demonstrates real mastery of the techniques involved.

These are generational time scales, people. And note: the only ones that will benefit in the next ten years will be those that expend the time needed to stretch the cognition we have, now, into the configuration needed to extract more from the increasingly real-time web.

The most difficult argument to make is the following:

• We have always been confronted with a world -- both natural and human-made -- that offers an infinite amount of information.
• We have devised cultural tools -- like written language, mathematics, and the scientific method -- to help understand the world in richer ways, over and above our emotional and inbuilt cognitive capabilities.
• We are heading into a post-industrial world where information systems and the social matrix of the web have become the most important human artifact, one that is repurposing everything that has come before.
• We will need to construct new and more complex cultural tools -- things like augmented reality, massively parallel social tools, and ubiquitous mobile connected devices -- and new societal norms and structures to assist us in using them effectively.
• Many commentators -- including Armano and Peterson -- allude to the now generally accepted notion that we will have to leverage social systems (relying on social tools) to accomplish some part of the heavy lifting in whatever new schemes we develop for understanding this new world. But it has only been 10 years since we've been talking about social tools, and less than five that we had anything like real-time streaming applications or tools involving millions of users. It's early days.

In the final analysis, I am saying there is no 'answer' to those that say we are overloaded, that we are being driven mad by or enslaved to the tools we are experimenting with, or that there is some attention calculus that trumps all other value systems.

I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways, and once we start to do so, it will like take 10 years (the 10,000 hour rule again) before anyone demonstrates real mastery of the techniques involved.

Instead, I suggest we continue experimenting, cooking up new ways to represent and experience the flow of information, our friends' thoughts, recommendations, and whims, and the mess that is boiling in the huge cauldron we call the web.

There is no "answer" since they are asking a false question, one that hides preconceived premises and biases. Starting out with the assumption that we have moved past our abilities to cope with the stream of information, and therefore something has to give, is a bias.

In part, this arises from the desire of economists like Simon to find what is scarce, and ascribe a value to it. Or to media and PR types, who want to control discourse, and fill it with their 'messages' and influence social opinion or buying behavior.

But from a cognitive and anthropological viewpoint, these concerns are something like Socrate's argument that learning to read and write would debase the cognition of those that had become literate. In his era the ability to remember thousands of verses of poetry was the baseline for being enculturated, and he believed that something fundamental would be lost if we were to rely on books instead of our memories. He believed that writing was the fall from a better time, a lesser way to think and understand the world.

But I think that the rise of the social web, just like writing, the printing press, and the invention of money, are not really about the the end of what came before, but instead are the starting point for what comes next: richer and more complex societies. These technologies are a bridge we use to cross over into something new, not a wrecking ball tearing down the old.

There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world and our place in it.

PC World Looks At Litl

The litl OS consists of "cards," which are essentially Web widgets arranged in a grid on the home screen. Without hard drive space, litl users must depend on cloud-based services (and a Wi-Fi connection) for content. Browsing works just like a normal PC -- it sports a re-skinned Mozilla browser -- but widgets serve to heighten the experience.

Cards can be assigned to whatever Web page you'd like to track -- if a particular site offers an RSS feed, the litl will subscribe, and stream updates. An app called the Mediawall will aggregate photo-feeds from popular web services like Snapfish and Flickr, and the HDMI port makes piping content onto a larger screen easy.

via www.pcworld.com

Yet another review of the Litl that fails to mention the biggest breakthrough of the OS: no folders and no files.

Murdoch's TimesOnline Blocks Spidering

Murdock is moving ahead with his plans to block search engines from spidering his content, at least at the TimesOnline site. Here's the robots.txt file, which clearly states 'spidering is not allowed'.

##ACAP version=1.0

#Robots.txt File
#Version: 0.8
#Last updated: 04/01/2010
#Site contents Copyright Times Newspapers Ltd
#Please note our terms and conditions http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,497,00.html 
#Spidering is not allowed by our terms and conditions 
#Authorised spidering is subject to permission 
#For authorisation please contact us - see http://www.nisyndication.com/about_us.html

# Globally Disallowed Sections: All Robots
User-agent: *
Disallow: /_gatools/
Disallow: /_nipd/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /img/
Disallow: /tol/Print.do
Disallow: /tol/sitesearch.do
Disallow: /tol/incomingFeeds
Disallow: /tol/arts_and_entertainment/commercial/vip_lounge
Disallow: /tol/viewArticle.arc
Disallow: /tol/tools_and_services/rss/times_mobile_content/
Disallow: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_2/
Disallow: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_3/
Disallow: /tol/tlskeywordsearch.tls

#Agent Specific Disallowed Sections
User-agent: NewsNow
Disallow: /

User-agent: Omgili
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebVac
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZip
Disallow: /

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

ACAP-crawler: *
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /_gatools/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /_nipd/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /images/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /img/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/Print.do
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/arts_and_entertainment/commercial/vip_lounge
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/viewArticle.arc
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/tools_and_services/rss/times_mobile_content/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_2/
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /tol/tools_and_services/mobile_times/mobile_3/

ACAP-crawler: NewsNow
ACAP-crawler: Omgili
ACAP-crawler: WebVac
ACAP-crawler: WebZip
ACAP-crawler: psbot
ACAP-crawler: ia_archiver
ACAP-disallow-crawl: /

via www.timesonline.co.uk

The policies section of the site goes way beyond what I would imagine copyright fair use allows:

2. Acceptable Use Policy

You agree to abide by all applicable laws, regulations and codes of conduct and ensure that any content uploaded or distributed or stored by you does not infringe the rights of others.

All material on the Websites and any material sent to you by e-mail or any other form from the Websites (the "content") or in any way relating to the Websites belongs to our licensors or us. You may retrieve and display content from the Websites on the Electronic Device on which you first accessed it or downloaded it, print a single copy of individual pages on paper and store such pages for caching purposes only, all for your personal and non-commercial use alone.

We, or our licensors, own the copyright and all other intellectual property rights associated with the content, save where otherwise stated.

You may not do any of the following without prior written permission from us:

• redistribute any of the content (including using it as part of any library, archive or similar service);
• remove the copyright or trade mark notice(s) from any copies of content made in accordance with these Terms and Conditions;
• create a database in electronic or structured manual form by systematically downloading and storing all and any of the content.

Requests to republish, redistribute or syndicate content should be addressed to: enquiries@nisyndication.com.

You acknowledge that we own the Trade Marks and that you may not use any of them without our prior written permission. Other product and company names and logos mentioned or displayed in the Websites may be the trade marks, service marks or trading names of third parties. To check whether any product or service is a registered trade mark of ours please contact: trademarks@newsint.co.uk.

In the long run, this is craziness. Search engines direct people to your website. Asking search engines to stop is based on a bizarro world counterlogic where directing people to sits is stealing content.

[pointer by The NextWeb]

Too Square For Foursquare?

There’s an awful lot of excitement about Foursquare, a mobile social media service that lets you share and broadcast your location. Based on your activity, you badges and can become the mayor of a particular location (e.g. Starbucks) by visiting it more often than other Foursquare users.

After being scolded by Robert Scoble recently for not getting Foursquare, I decided to try it out. Although my test was fairly brief, it didn’t take long to realize Foursquare isn’t my cup of tea. While I can certainly see the appeal for some people, the idea of broadcasting my location doesn’t feel right. In fact, it makes me think of George Orwell’s “1984″ as opposed to feeling that I’m on the cutting edge of social media activity.

Hey, we’re living in a world where we’re increasingly sharing more of what we do, think, see and eat but where does it end? For me, Twitter and my blogs are the tools to share things. At the same time, I like the idea of other people not exactly knowing where I’m located and what I’m doing.

Sure, you have to submit your location to Foursquare so it’s not like your mobile device is broadcast beacon. And I get that some (many?) people may like the idea of being able to tell friends where they are and what they’re doing so they can easily connect but there are other ways to do it – Twitter and Facebook.

My lack of interest in Foursquare may be off-base, and I may be overly concerned about my privacy or the amount of information that really needs to be shared with other people, but my spider-sense tingles when it comes to the service.

Is it just me or does Foursquare not resonate with other people? Am I missing something?

via www.markevanstech.com

Unlike Mark, I am perfectly happy to share my geoloco publicly: hell, I am Mr Publicy.

But I don't like Foursquare's game aspect: becoming the mayor of a diner or bar doesn't move me much.

I was once in a geoloco deathmatch with Joi Ito in the dim dark days of Plazes, when we were tagging wifi spots. Maybe that's what burned me out to the game side of geoloco.

And I similarly don't click with Gowalla.

I use BrightKite fitfully, but it's too heavyweight, with yet another social network, blogging platform, photos, etc.

What I would really like to see is something tightly reliant on my Twitter network, that would let me simply post my geolocation and people could find out where I was by looking at a map page. I may hack something kludgey, like a short URL to a google maps page. Since I have the sto.ly domain sort of working through bit.ly, that should be easy enough.

Social Business Online Panel: Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, and Joshua-Michele Ross

Social Business: Taking "social" to the core of your organization

Thursday, January 14, 2010, 10am PT, San Francisco

6pm - London | 1pm - New York | Fri, Jan 15th at 5am - Sydney | Fri, Jan 15th at 3am - Tokyo | Fri, Jan 15th at 2am - Beijing | 10:30pm - Mumbai

Presented by: Joshua-Michele Ross

Duration: Approximately 90 minutes. Cost: Free

An online panel featuring Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, and Joshua-Michele Ross

2009 was the year that "social" seemed to become a ubiquitous prefix--from social computing, social media, and social web, to social CRM and finally Social Business.

This last term has been getting a lot of attention as organizations move beyond social media as solely a channel for marketing and tackle the bigger implications social technologies have on business.

Join leading thinkers Stowe Boyd, Peter Kim and Jeremiah Owyang in a discussion with Radar's Joshua-Michéle Ross on the concept of Social Business. We will cover:

• What is the definition of Social Business?
• Who are the best exemplars?
• How does the concept of Social Business challenge larger institutions?

This will be a fast-paced, structured conversation that will leave plenty of time for audience questions.

via www.oreillynet.com

Joshua-Michele Ross will be moderating an online discussion with Peter Kim (Dachis Group), Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group) and me on the topic of social business.

Should be cool. Don't forget to register. See you next week!

To Get Organized, Get Unorganized

I was planning to write a post about my unorganized organization approach when I saw several folks (@tamadear and @megfowler) mention a post by Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) about her approach. She uses some of the same tools I do (gmail, for example) but the biggest similarity is in what she calls the Dynamite Philosophy:

The Dynamite Philosophy: Blow Things Up

I tweeted earlier this week that I blew up my to-do list completely, and started over. Why? I realized that things weren’t organized in the way I needed to review them. So, I broke it all down, and started fresh.

If you haven’t answered the email lingering in your inbox, either do so, or delete it. Someday never comes.

If you find you aren’t using your to-do list, it’s probably not fitting the way you think. Nuke it. Start over.

If you haven’t read all the posts in your reader, Mark All As Read and walk away.

Once you’ve selected tools, if they don’t work, ditch them and try something else. If one method of tackling projects doesn’t work, blow it up and try something else. If you don’t need a tool anymore, get rid of it. This isn’t a forever relationship. Your organizational style and attack on projects needs to evolve with you. If I’d stuck to the work style I used five years ago, it would be crippling me today.

Lastly, realize that no system is bulletproof or perfect. Do the best you can. Tweak it, refine it, but stop obsessing over organization. The system isn’t the goal. You’re trying to get your stuff done. Over engineering kills action, every time.

So what are your keys for getting stuff done? What systems and methods work for you?

via altitudebranding.com

This willingness to 'blow things up' is the starting point of my unorganized approach to being organized. As I have pointed out in the past, I am a 'scruffy': the term that is used by people who study organization call people like me.

According to the authors of the fabulous book, A Perfect Mess, I am what is known as a "scruffy" (see In Praise Of (A Little) Mess: Be (A Little) Scruffy).

Scruffies don't organize everything: they are "data-driven", using their environment to channel their work, like the piles of things I leave on my desk to which I will eventually turn my attention, or the electronic stickies in which I clip things. "Neats", on the other hand, use a small number of "explicit coordinating structures" -- organizers, to-do lists, and in-boxes -- to determine what to do next.

via 3 Life Meta Hacks: Erosion, Streams, And Piles

I am willing to bet that Amber is a neat.

But I do have a style of organization -- aside from piles on my desk -- and right now I am using a small number of 'explicit coordinating structures' as well:

• I am using Gmail as my mail system, although increasingly that is blurred with messaging in Twitter. (Dear Google, is someone in the labs working on making Gmail a Twitter client? I really would like to be able to search for a contact, and get the list of emails and Twitter interactions with them.)
• I have returned to using RememberTheMilk as a task list, and I use it in a simple way. Twitter integration is good, although I have had a few accidents mistyping something instead of 'd rtm' which is problematic. Mostly, though, I find the gmail integration just better that Gmail's tasks. Basically, I am falling back on using tags in RTM rather than projects, because it makes the UI simpler.
• Instapaper is where I post URLs that I want to read later, but I don't understand why that is not twitter-integrated. I am thinking of using Droplr for this instead.
• I am dividing my blogging between Tumblr (www.underpaidgenius.com) and Typepad (www.stoweboyd.com) for reasons too complex to mention here. I am also using Tumblr for work-related private blogs in a way that has replaced my use of Basecamp.

My workflow is to add things to my task list as they appear -- either from phone, email, or face to face -- and to schedule deadlines. I generally work on a single project -- say, the Social Business Epicenter conference -- for a chunk of time, like a few hours, wearing down the list, taking next steps, calling people, whatever. And then I shift to another project.

I confess I do not start everyday by checking my list. I usually wait until I have read the paper and email, and then organize my day based on scheduled calls and meetings, and what other tasks I hope to accomplish.

I write best in the morning so I try to avoid scheduling calls then, and push those to after lunch. I think everyone should take their personal biology into account, along with organizational style.

I periodically rebuild all my tasks from scratch, deleting the old versions, and updating notes on what needs to get done and why. Not everything in the list has turned out to be as important as I first thought. A number of things just get killed in this way, and the things that remain are most likely the important things. This sort of erosion is a powerful technique for organizing by being unorganized.

Augmented Reality Driving

via www.youtube.com

I found a video uploaded to YouTube by Joachim Gelhaus (I think), showing an augmented reality hack for driving using "windows 7 notebook, Royaltek GPS receiver, webcam, arduino board with 2-axis compass module."

Here we start to see the possibilities of AR-driving, but I would like to see someone displaying this on the inside of the windshield (see Your Next Computer: Your Car).

Geopublicy: Do You Know Where Your Lover Is?

Sam Altman, the chief executive of Loopt, a mobile tracking service that allows users to monitor friends’ locations using the G.P.S. software on their cellphones, said he was seeing social mores shift firsthand. About 20 percent of Loopt’s users are couples who buy the service to keep track of each other’s whereabouts. But in the past six months, there has been an increase in the number of customers who use fake locations as a decoy so a person doesn’t know where they are, Mr. Altman said, a service that Loopt offers.

He explained that some of those customers have broken up and now want privacy. At the same time, they don’t want to offend an ex by overtly letting them know they have been blocked. “People who break up always want to change their location immediately,” Mr. Altman said. At the same time, “unless it was nasty, they don’t want rush to tell everyone they’ve split up either,” he said. “Better to be cautious than hasty.”

The reason is simple: some hope the romance will be rekindled. Similarly, closing a joint bank account or switching to “single” status on your Facebook page suggests a permanent break.

via Laura Holson, www.nytimes.com

As we move into the decade of publicy, and traditional notions of privacy become cloudy, if not obsolete, many wrenching changes are coming. The Loopt example is a great one, since it's like a box of party favors being turned into a car bomb. A simple geolocation service that allows people to remain aware of friends' locations is turned into a snooping device by jealous or anxious lovers. So people begin to throw out false geolocation info, while visiting the apartment of their back street girl or guy.

And if they split up, the first signal to others might be a change in geoloco. It really means something if your geoloco is your brother's apartment at 3pm, and not where you have been living with your new ex for the last year and a half. It may be more of an indicator of something gone wrong than changing your status to  'It's complicated.'

In the time of publicy, we can't turn everything off -- go private -- when some relationship goes sideways. That sends a host of distress signals, too. All we are left with is the possibility of a graduated shading of status -- in this case, geopublic white lies -- until the new status situation has filtered out into our surrounding network of friends and contacts.